Slashdot Mirror
HP is Tech's New Top Dog?
bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek argues that HP is the new Big Blue: 'Now, tech is about to get a new biggest behemoth. It's HP. The Palo Alto, Calif., PC and printer giant had higher sales than IBM last quarter, and analysts project it will finish 2006 with greater annual sales than Big Blue for the first time ever: $91 billion for HP vs. $90.5 billion for IBM. The reason HP pulled ahead is simple: IBM last year sold off its $11 billion PC business to Lenovo Group Ltd. But, because the companies have chosen fundamentally different paths, with HP aggressively going after consumers while IBM focuses on corporations, HP is expected to grow faster than IBM in coming years. Since both use blue in their logos, you might say there's a new Big Blue in the house.'"
I would hope that there are enough people on /. with a solid enough grasp of technology to be less impressed with market numbers, and instead be able to actually see what a company has contributed. At least when ranking them in terms of a top dog in tech.
Google has done some cool stuff, no doubt, but their contributions to the tech world are a mere blip on a timeline that has IBM footprints all over it. Not that that's Google's fault, they're a relatively new company, we'll have to wait and see how long they remain relevant for.
MS certainly is a top dog, although one can argue over the value of some of their contributions, everyone else definately pays attention to what they're doing. I don't think the average techie is particularly concerned with HP's upcoming ideas/products. But I will agree with the article summary on one point, their logo is definitely blue. Good catch on that one.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
It's moderately interesting that HP has managed to sell more things than IBM has. But selling a whole lot of low-margin low-end systems doesn't really make for a bigger company overall. IBM still seems to have a better focus (despite its huge size), as well as better margins. Of course, no one has the huge margins than a monopoly gets you; but IBM is one of those companies that actually earns its money relatively honestly.
Buy Text Processing in Python
I work in a datacenter at a billion-dollar software company with many HP and IBM big iron servers. I don't work at IBM or HP. We like HPs **way** better, as they are far easier to manage:
-HP's boot way faster
-HP's have sane BIOS's. IBM's have text-based, very slow BIOS's.
-HP's break down less often. IBM's have more fragile hardware.
-When HP's do break down, the fix is always way faster and straightforward.
-IBM tech support guys need to visit us so often that there is a desk dedicated to them!
-HP's report hardware errors in plain english, IBM error codes always are obscure, like 20EE000B (which means "no bootable disk found")
-HP's website is better when you're searching for updates and such
The difference is this: IBM actually does research and development of new technology. HP sells printers.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The original poster is aparently unaware of the meaning of "Big Blue". It isn't because of IBM's color choice that it got that name. It is because it is the most famous and largest business in the world. ( Even if that's not still literally true, it certainly was when it got the name ) "Big Blue" derives from it being a "Blue Chip" stock, which is a Wall Street nickname for companies that are (usually) large stable company that seem to always do well. IBM is/was the strongest company the market had ever seen, and earned the nickname that way.
really?
:)
I guess you haven't seen the Integrity line then. Serious performance, blows away both the Sun and IBM UNIX systems. Superdomes rock.
My fairly-new (2 years old) HP printer is a LaserJet (a color one), it's not slow, and it works perfectly with CUPS on MacOS X. It has had exactly 0 problems.
What you'll find is that HP DeskJet-series printers are crap, have tiny ink-tanks that cost a fortune, make a lot more noise than they should, have crappy drivers with lots of useless, space-consuming utilities included, and break in under a year.
I thought that deserved clarification, since I've had nothing but good experiences with HP's LaserJet products.
you must be joking, it's been two years and still no new Itanium2 chip, the integrity line is stagnant and future looking bleak. There's rumors of Intel selling off the whole Itanium fiasco to jap consortium since they can't get dual-core to work
He actually made the company profitable and focused on emerging markets and retailers.
Fiona focused on screwing the engineers and developers and rewarding the sales department whenever something good or innovative happened. Alot of good people left and were undervalued. What a shame?
Hurd at NCR was used to having multiple products unrelating and knowing how to make money off them. HP refocused their strategy with selling computers to neophites and including software for pictures and video editing and reducing the sales price of the items at the retailers. Dell just kept reselling the same stuff only online and newbies want to be able to be told what the computers can do rather than buy something online without testing it out.
So far Hurd created supply chains as good as Dells and with the revamped marketing it was a kill to Dell.
So I think Hurd is to reward for their success.
http://saveie6.com/
Give me a break. Itanium is going the way of the dodo and even Sun has enough damned sense to go AMD.
In addition, in the datacaenter where I work (Fortune 5 company, motherfucker) it is all Sun and IBM. Dell used to be there but a combination of Win2k Datacenter Edition running on their servers was enough to deep six that idea. HP's purely idiotic field engineering and sales forces managed to get them nixed as well. In the long run my money's on Big Blue, but I think if Sun evolves it'll hang in there for awhile as well. Solaris dogs HP/UX any day of the week.
As for HP? They need to stick with cheesy inkjets. They can't even support the OpenVMS folks properly.